Many Miles Are Yet To Go For Civil Rights Marchers

March 3, 1985

PRIDE AND courage marked the 500 marchers as they approached the bridge in Selma, Ala., 20 years ago. Apprehension, too, because they could see the state troopers and mounted sheriff`s deputies awaiting them.

Soon the Edmund Pettus Bridge turned into a one-sided battleground, as unarmed and nonviolent black marchers were clubbed and routed by troopers and deputies who used tear gas, billy clubs and whips. But Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, was just a temporary setback, because two weeks later Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands of blacks and whites on the historic 50-mile march to Montgomery.

Today marchers will gather again in Selma to repeat the march and honor its success, but there is little likelihood of violence on this 20th anniversary. Instead, they will march for five days in another kind of atmosphere, in which black Americans have achieved hard-won freedoms, but also in which full equality of opportunity remains for many just a dream.

It is entirely fitting that this anniversary be observed by another walk across rural Alabama to Montgomery, the state capital. And it is no less fitting that the anniversary be a time of assessing gains made since then -- and gains still to be achieved.

The original march to Montgomery was a catalyst that led to millions of blacks being permitted to vote in southern states for the first time. After Bloody Sunday, President Johnson asked Congress for a law to protect the right to vote. And he got it, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

That act is called ``the most significant legislation in our lifetime`` by Mayor Joe Smitherman of Selma, who also was mayor 20 years ago -- and who is white. The Voting Rights Act was preceded by another major law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which opened public accommodations to everyone and barred discrimination by employers and labor unions.

Those two blockbuster laws, plus the one-man, one-vote decision of the Supreme Court, enabled blacks and other minorities to take significant steps into America`s mainstream. Yet they soon found that progress in voting and public accommodations, and a lesser degree of progress in jobs, did little to diminish prejudice and the history of inferior education and exclusion from some aspects of American life.

Nonviolence gave way to riots in the cities. And the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the messiah of nonviolence, set off more violence. The concept of Black Power took a more central role in black communities.

Today there is no black leader comparable to King. Yet in communities across the nation, blacks push steadily to get better jobs, housing and education.

Today the Congress is no longer a major source of help for minorities, at least in the sense of anything new. Many blacks have turned to themselves, concentrating on self help. Others turned to state and local governments, and increasingly to the private sector, for a chance at jobs and a decent life. Whether the private sector will shoulder that responsibility remains uncertain, as does the future for American blacks.

So they will march the 50 miles this week in both joy and sorrow. For there are many more miles to go.